Turbocharged Theresa finally lets loose her inner tigress
THERESA May strode on stage practically geysering adrenaline. Crumbs, she was pumped. Turbocharged Theresa – and yes, they really did play the Rolling Stones for background beat – did some mad double-waving of the arms.
She bounced on her glittery disco heels and gave a wiggle of two hips in slinky magenta. Prime Minister, puh-lease!
Stillness descended and we had a long pause. Gawd, I thought, now she’s dried. Had the autocue gone on the blink? But she was merely taking a deep breath, savouring the view from the top board, before, twang, she dived into an hour-long speech which spanked her imprint on the Conservative party and rammed home some moral imperatives of Centrism.
She began: ‘When we came to Birmingham this week, big questions were hanging in the air. Do we have a plan for Brexit?’ Her eyes flashed under Cleopatra make-up. ‘We do.’ Next: ‘Are we ready for the effort it will take?’ Another flash of the headlights. ‘We are.’
Then: ‘Can Boris Johnson stay on message for a full four days?’ She pulled a dubious look and did a little levitation with one palm. ‘Hmmmm, just about.’ As the hall laughed, releasing tension, Foreign Secretary Boris in row three did a wounded ‘oi, wot have I done, ref?’ Let us hope Boris will not mind that she just took ownership of him.
People voted for change on June 23 ‘ and change is going to come’. The word ‘revolution’ was used three times in the first minutes. Indeed, it had been ‘the quiet revolution’.
The aristocracy she wanted toppled by this revolution were not the old tweedy overlords of the shires. They were the Philip Greens and Googles of this world who ignored ‘the spirit of citizenship’ – people who ‘behave as though they have more in common with international elites than with the people down the road’. This was terrific rabble-rousing stuff and it could never have been uttered by David Cameron (though she took care to praise her absent predecessor; the hall gave him a big hand).
Talking of hands, she was using hers a lot – first one side of her special wooden lectern, now the other. She could have been mixing a margarita in a cocktail shaker.
‘Change’ and ‘ ordinary, working- class people’ kept being mentioned. Her ‘vision’ was of Britain as ‘a Great Meritocracy’ – capital letters as in the text we were handed afterwards, thank you.
That test also reminds me that she essayed a saccharine passage about triathlete Alistair Brownlee helping brother Jonny over the line in Mexico. All we needed was Rolf Harris singing ‘Two Little Boys’. She praised ‘that typically Brit- ish, quiet resolve’ that had made these people ‘defy the Establishment’ on June 23 – an Establishment, ahem, which she had supported. The activists liked it when she said ‘our laws made not in Brussels but in Westminster’. In front of me sat a Belgian journalist with a laptop. I saw her type the words ‘yeah yeah’.
The May of the past would never have dared pick so many fights in one speech – her caution was her most maddening trait – but now she was happy to biff Remainer commentators (presumably at the BBC, Guardian etc.) who sneered at patriotism and who could not comprehend bucca- neering Brexit voters. Only the naughty part of me was tempted to yell ‘so why did you not support Leave, Theresa?’
Coming over all Clint Eastwood, she said ‘if you’re a tax dodger, we’re coming after you’. She also had a go at the Labour party – ‘sanctimonious’, ‘extreme’ and ‘absurd’ were some of the adjectives she threw at them. But the moment she sounded genuinely angry was when she laid into ‘activist, left-wing human rights lawyers who harass the bravest of the brave, the men and women of Britain’s armed forces’. And in that moment we saw an impressive flash of the tigress.